Topic: Winning at the Starting Line: The Key School Education Premium and Housing Prices in Beijing

Lecturer: Xuan HAN is a doctorial student at National School of Development, Peking University. He graduated from the School of Mathematical Sciences of Beijing Normal University. His main research areas are Real Estate Economics, Macroeconomics and Educational Economics. He participated in the 2018 CES North American Annual Meeting, served as the host of the parallel session at 18th China Economics Annual Meeting. He is one of the anonymous reviewers for China Economic Quarterly as well.

Time: Dec. 19, 2018, Wednesday, 12:30-13:30

Venue: Room 913, Main Building in city campus of CUFE

Moderator: Zhigang HUANG, Professor in the School of Finance at CUFE

Abstract: This paper estimates the valuation of elite primary schools in Beijing during 2013–16 based on the price premium of the residential housing in their corresponding school attendance zones. First, the regression-discontinuity method is applied and the sample is restricted to the area where the rental price difference becomes statistically insignificant across school attendance zone boundaries. In this way, the analysis separates the neighborhood effect from the school quality effect. Second, the paper proposes a novel instrumental variable, using a Voronoi diagram to construct a theoretical school attendance zone boundary. The theoretical boundary is used to solve the endogenous school attendance zone quality problem that school attendance zone boundaries are expected to change over time.